This Anglo-French co-production is a watchable if contrived entertainment, sugary and soapy at the same time, bringing a touch of Albert Square to the very heart of picturesque Normandy. It’s an adaptation of Posy Simmonds’ 1999 graphic novel Gemma Bovery, which began life as a serial in the Guardian; satirising middle-class lifestyle aspiration and, a little like the Woody Allen short story The Kugelmass Episode, it surreally drops modern characters into the Flaubert novel Madame Bovary.
Fabrice Luchini is the one actor who is entirely and comfortably at home in this film. He plays Martin, a former Paris publisher who has retired to a little northern French town to run his late father’s bakery and becomes mesmerised by his delectable new English neighbour Gemma Bovery, gamely and intelligently played by Gemma Arterton with some persuasive French dialogue. He conceives a neurotic and menopausal obsession with her Flaubertian extramarital adventures (the camera is always leching over her curves) and the tragic danger that Gemma must therefore be in. The finale is almost farcically ridiculous, of a piece with the film’s tonal variety and the rather uneven performances. But there are entertainingly sharp cartoon stabs at the new opportunist-bourgeois English in France. It’s silly but enjoyable – and Luchini is, as ever, very elegant.
